In The Struggle for a Better World, Peter J. Boettke explores how the social sciences, and political economy in particular, help us understand society and its institutions of governance. Boettke advances an approach for understanding, articulating, and pursuing a coherent and consistent vision of a society of free and responsible individuals who may prosper through voluntary participation in the market and their communities. In this volume, a collection of addresses, lectures, and papers over the past two decades, Boettke articulates ideas which, if consistently pursued, can help fulfill liberalism's emancipatory promise to advance human flourishing and overcome adversity caused by economic, social, and political injustice and repression. Boettke advocates for liberal cosmopolitanism, grounded in the principles of equality, justice, and liberty, and the basic recognition that all people are dignified equals, as the best hope for a better world. 

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Economic and Political Liberalism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

1.   The Battle of Ideas: Economics and the Struggle for a Better World

2.   Economics and Public Administration

3.   Liberty vs. Power in Economic Policy in the 20th and 21st Centuries 73

4.   What Happened to "Efficient Markets"?

5.   Is State Intervention in the Economy Inevitable?

6.   Why Does Government Overspend? Because It Has TooMuch Power

7.   The Role of the Economist in a Free Society

8.   Don't Be a "Jibbering Idiot": Economic Principlesand the Properly Trained Economist

9.   Information and Knowledge: Austrian Economics in Searchof Its Uniqueness

10. What Should Classical Liberal Political Economists Do?

11. Context, Continuity, and Truth: Theory, History, and Political Economy

12. Fearing Freedom: The Intellectual and Spiritual Challenge to Liberalism

13. Rebuilding the Liberal Project

14. The Reception of Free to Choose and the Problem of the Tacit Presuppositions of Political Economy

15. Competition, Discovery, and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Case for International Liberalism in Our Time

16. Pessimistically Optimistic about the Future

Conclusion: Liberalism, Socialism, and Our Future

About the Author

Index